ON THE DENSITY DISTRIBUTION IN STAR-FORMING INTERSTELLAR CLOUDS

Abstract

We use deep adaptive mesh refinement simulations of isothermal\nself-gravitating supersonic turbulence to study the imprints of gravity on the\nmass density distribution in molecular clouds. The simulations show that the\ndensity distribution in self-gravitating clouds develops an extended power-law\ntail at high densities on top of the usual lognormal. We associate the origin\nof the tail with self-similar collapse solutions and predict the power index\nvalues in the range from -7/4 to -3/2 that agree with both simulations and\nobservations of star-forming molecular clouds.\n